Stolen Away

“You don’t strike me as a bigoted person.”

“Hey, I’m half Jew. I’d be in the same boat, if I hadn’t been dealt my mother’s physical traits. Don’t let’s go high-hat on me, Evalyn—most of your servants are colored, while none of the guests at your Washington soirees are…unless it’s the King of Zanzibar or something.”

“Sometimes I don’t know when you’re kidding.”

“That’s easy—when it sounds like I’m kidding, I’m not. When it sounds like I’m not kidding, I am.” I checked my watch. “I think we’ve killed enough time—we can visit Mrs. Henkel, now.”

We’d called ahead to see Gerta Henkel, friend of both Richard and Anna Hauptmann, and she’d said to come over in the early afternoon; she and her husband Carl lived in Kohl’s rooming house at 149 East 127th, where Isidor Fisch had also lived. So had several other good friends of the Hauptmanns, from the clique of German immigrants who made merry at Hunter’s Island.

I pulled the Packard into the Warner-Quinlan filling station at the corner of East 127th and Lexington, a large modem station with a service garage and billboards trumpeting itself on either side.

“Do you know what this place is?” I asked Evalyn.

“It’s a gas station, Nate. Don’t they have these in Chicago?”

“It’s the gas station: the one where Hauptmann passed the gold certificate that got him caught. And just three doors down from here is Fisch’s apartment house.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Does that mean anything?”

“I don’t know.”

I got out of the Packard and, as he was filling the tank, asked the attendant if the manager was here.

“Walter?” the mustached, geeky attendant asked. “Sure. You want I should get him?”

“Please.”

Walter Lyle, the filling-station manager, came out rubbing grease off his hands with a rag. He was a somewhat stocky, pleasant-looking guy in his late thirties; he wore a cap and a coin-changer.

“Help you?” he asked with a neutral smile.

“My name’s Heller,” I said, and I flashed him my badge. “Doing one final follow-up investigation on the Hauptmann case.”

He smiled. You could see in his eyes that this was a big deal in his life; he hadn’t got tired yet of people asking him about how he helped nab Hauptmann.

“Always glad to help, Officer,” he said.

I hadn’t said I was a cop, of course, but there was no law saying I had to correct him.

“We understand,” I said, “that Hauptmann had some friends in the neighborhood.”

“Still does—some of ’em live just down the block.”

“Did you know that at the time?”

That seemed to confuse him. “What do you mean?”

“Was Hauptmann a regular customer? Stands to reason he might’ve stopped in here before, since he had friends just down the street.”

“He wasn’t a regular customer, no. I might’ve seen him around.”

“Might’ve?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think it was his first time in. I think that blue sedan of his had rolled in here now and then. First time he passed a gold certificate, though.”

That in itself was interesting.

“How about this guy Isidor Fisch?”

‘That’s the ‘Fisch story’ fella, right? I guess he did live around here.”

“Just a few doors down the street.”

“Maybe so, but I didn’t know him. He was poor as a church mouse, I hear, so stands to reason he wouldn’t even have a car.”

“That’s probably right,” I said. “Well, thank you.”

“Any time, Officer. You didn’t want to go over how I come to notice the gold certificate? We’d been told to be careful of counterfeits, so…”

“No, that’s okay, Mr. Lyle.”

“Oh. Well, fine.” He couldn’t hide his disappointment. “Good afternoon to you, Officer.”

The brownstone down the block was a five-story walk-up; this was a fairly busy thoroughfare, and many of the buildings had a bottom-floor storefront, but not this one. It had obviously been an apartment house at one time, but as the neighborhood had begun to slide got converted to a rooming house, large apartments turned into modest one-and two-room suites.

Gerta Henkel was an apple-cheeked strudel in a cream-colored sweater that showed off her finer points. Around her pale neck she wore some cheap pearls, which she toyed with as she met us at the door. Her eyes were small and dark and wide-set, and her mouth was generous if rather thin-lipped. She smiled frequently. She offered me her hand, at the door of the little flat, and her grasp was warm and soft.

“Thank you for seeing us, Mrs. Henkel.”

We stepped inside and she closed the door.

“Mr. Heller,” she said, “anything I can do to help Richard, I will.”

Her accent touched certain words—“anyt’ing”—in an appealing way.

“This is Evalyn McLean,” I said, introducing the two women, who gave each other cold appraisals. They instinctively did not like each other, not uncommon between two women who are attractive in differing ways, but shook hands and smiled in a bad approximation of cordiality.

She led us to a little table near a gauzily curtained window overlooking the street. Her hips were sheathed in a black skirt and she walked with a sway as compelling as the swing of a hypnotist’s watch.

“I’ll get coffee,” she said. “Cream or sugar, anyone?”